Center for a New American Security

If you are in Washington, DC today and have already given up on your New Years resolution to go to the gym after work each day, swing by the W Hotel around 6:00 tonight for an event featuring Philip Taubman's new book, The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. Taubman's book received a very positive review in the New York Times on Sunday. 

I am no specialist in nuclear weapons or arms control, but can I still share Henry Kissenger's doubts about whether "Nuclear Zero" is actually a good idea in practice?

Kissinger’s doubts hang ominously over “The Partnership.” The technology cannot be uninvented; when one country goes to zero, its enemy is sorely tempted to cheat; and the scarier the government, the less amenable it is to disarming. Many of the governments and dignitaries calling for abolition are just mouthing the words.

My worries exactly. Anyway, please RSVP here if you plan on attending. I am sure CNAS director Bill Perry will have lots of smart responses to my above concerns. 

One of the biggest compliments I have received as a researcher came in the summer of 2010, when Nick Blanford, who was finishing a military history of Hezbollah, asked me to read and comment on his thousand-page manuscript. Even though Nick and I had been friends for several years, it takes a lot of trust to give someone working on a very similar subject to your own full access to your unedited work and all your sources. (I was finishing up a doctoral dissertation on Hezbollah at the time.) Now that the manuscript has been pared down to just 544 pages and published, I can tell you that if you only buy and read one book this holiday season, it should be Nick's Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah's Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel. Nick was in town last week, and I convinced him to participate in a question-and-answer session for the blog. I respect Nick so much that I even changed the way I transliterate Hizballah Hezbollah in his honor -- something I have only done once before, for Thomas Hegghammer. 

Nick, first off, thank you so much for allowing me to read this book when it was still in its unedited early drafts. It was incredibly useful to me as I finished my dissertation, and it was a rip-roaring yarn. What a fantastic story you have written. This is truly the work of a lifetime, and I have been telling people for 12 months now, when they ask me about the one book they should read on Hezbollah, that they should read your magnum opus. Tell us: how relieved are you to have this work finally published?

Thanks, Ex, for those kind words. I guess I have mixed feelings about finishing the book. It's a project that was over a decade in the making. I first began mulling a book on Hezbollah's military evolution around 1999 as the Israeli occupation was drawing to an end and the prospects of peace between Israel and Syria were looking good. If peace had been achieved, it would have led to Hezbollah's disarming. Of course, there was no peace deal and Hezbollah has only grown stronger since then. One writes to one's strengths and my intention always was to write a book telling Hezbollah's military story which has been the focus of most of my reporting from Lebanon over the past decade and a half. There are plenty of good books on Hizbullah looking at its ideology and structure, but nothing comprehensive on the "resistance" which after all is the most important component of the party. I have been lucky enough to be in a unique position for a foreign journalist to watch in microscopic detail Hizbullah's military evolution unfold in real time since the mid 1990s. I wanted to produce a book of record that had sufficient weight to interest scholars and academics in the field who hopefully will continue to find it useful 10 or 20 years down the road, but also to provide enough color, reportage and anecdote to make it accessible to a more lay audience. When I began the writing process, I assumed I would need Hezbollah's help to fill gaps in my research, but as it turned out, my problem was not finding more information but choosing what to exclude from a rapidly expanding manuscript. You, Ex, had the misfortune of being the only person who read the much longer original manuscript, which was nudging a quarter of a million words before I started cutting. Very often, a book is improved when it is trimmed down and the MS becomes tighter. I think that's the case with Warriors, but there were some elements and stories that I was sorry to leave on the cutting room floor. In particular, the family and friends of Mohammed Saad, this incredibly resourceful and interesting Amal leader in south Lebanon in the early 1980s, provided me with boxes of information, but I could only use a fraction of it in the book.

Hezbollah goes from just another crappy Lebanese militia in the early 1980s to the most feared non-state actor in the world. Briefly tell us how.

Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s and was initially very much guided by the Iranians. It owes its creation to the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982, although its leadership had been mulling establishing some form of anti-Israel resistance that followed the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini since the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. Hezbollah's military exploits began slowly but by the latter half of the 1990s they had come to dominate the resistance against the Israeli occupation in the south. In those days, it was fairly ramshackle, and tactics - such as human wave assaults against Israel outposts - cost them a lot of casualties. Hezbollah's "Golden Years" were in the 1990s - the second phase of the party's evolution - when with the civil war over and under the protection of Syria, Hezbollah was able to focus its activities on resistance. The Islamic Resistance was adaptive and a quick learner and it was fascinating in those days to watch them improve year-on-year. The Israeli withdrawal in 2000 marked the beginning of Hezbollah's third phase. This is where they evolved from a resourceful guerrilla group employing classic hit-and-run tactics into something that folks like you describe as a "hybrid force" - a group that employs a blend of guerrilla and conventional weapons and tactics. Hezbollah today is probably the most formidable non-state military actor in the world. Although we concentrate on Hezbollah's ever expanding arsenal of weapons, for me the most telling aspect of its evolution is its highly complex and advanced electronic warfare and communications systems.

This book focuses primarily on Hezbollah's military activities, but as you know, I always argue the non-kinetic lines of operations -- the information operations, the social services -- are as important to Hezbollah as their military operations. Do you agree?

Absolutely. Hezbollah understood the importance of hearts-and-minds very early on. In fact, it was the Iranians that introduced the concept back in 1982 when among the first things they did on arriving in the Bekaa in the summer of that year was to begin building clinics and providing basic social services along with the lectures and religious educational programs. Jihad al-Binna, Hezbollah's flagship social welfare organization, began operating in 1985. I write about this in the book and how Hezbollah has expanded the social welfare activities to create what they call a "culture of resistance". This makes it much more than simply patching up war-damaged homes, providing free education and medical aid. The community becomes part of the "resistance". Youngsters now grow up in an atmosphere of resistance, jihad, martyrdom and hostility toward Israel. Hezbollah does not accept combatants below the age of 18, but by the time a new recruit has reached the age to join the Islamic Resistance, the chances are he will have been immersed since childhood in Hezbollah's "culture of resistance", reading anti-Israeli cartoon books when he was a kid, attending religious classes and Islamic scouting camps in the school holidays. Maybe even getting some basic weapons training when a young teenager. This culture, or society, of resistance testifies to Hezbollah's long-term strategic vision. Obviously the social welfare programs, the creation of a culture of resistance and even the parliamentary presence from 1992 was intended to build up and sustain Hezbollah's base of support. However, the byproduct of this massive emotional and financial investment is that Hezbollah today has a large constituency towards which it is answerable. When you win over a sizeable percentage of the population to your side, you have to respect and satisfy their needs. That adds another layer of complexity to an organization that is ideologically tied to a country 650 miles to the east the interests of which may not always coincide with the interests of Hezbollah's Lebanese constituency.

How does a researcher like yourself even write such a book? How did you gain the incredible access you gained, and are you worried about how the book will be received among your sources?

I have access to a number of Hezbollah people who are willing to talk to me either because they have come to know me over the years or on the assurances of mutual acquaintances. These guys are not supposed to talk to me at all, of course, so I am very careful to protect their identity. Mind you, what they tell me is a fraction of what they know, but it's more than other people get. I didn't ask for Hezbollah's formal help for my research. I have a huge database of information which I have built up over the past 16 years and I have interviewed just about all Hezbollah's leadership at some time or other. Will Hezbollah like the book? I think they will like some things and won't like others. It's a controversial subject and I think there's something in there for everyone to love and hate.

This is a two part question: a) why, in your professional reason, did I kill Rafik Hariri, and b) is it true that when Hezbollah speaks of the most gifted military commander they have ever faced, they speak of me on the paintball court?

I have always felt that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has been wasting its time examining the alleged roles of Syria and Hezbollah in Hariri's assassination. When I was researching my previous book - Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and its Impact on the Middle East - I quickly discovered the intense rivalry and hostility between you and Hariri: the financial dealings that went sour, how he thwarted your political ambitions in Lebanon, how you stole his girlfriends. You may recall that I was planning to expose the entire plot before your lawyers threated legal action. The truth will out one day, my friend. Seriously though, the guy who spread this rumor was acting extremely irresponsibly and really should be held accountable for spreading such malicious and potentially dangerous falsehoods. As for the paintball competition, all I recall of that was you curled up on the floor pleading for mercy as the Hezbollah guys splattered you with paint pellets. Or was that me?

It was probably me. A certain H.P. Flashman has always been my role model when the bullets -- or paintball pellets -- start flying. Anyway, I always end these interviews with a few questions about food and drink. You, my friend, are a past master of the Beirut bar scene, but now that you are a family man with a beautiful wife and kids, where do you like to go in Lebanon for a nice meal?

I like the Greedy Goose because they serve locally brewed 961 beer and I meet some journo friends there once a week. I am out of touch with most bars in Beirut these days. I preferred the good old days when there were perhaps three bars in Beirut, the best of which was the Lord Kitchener which was at the back of an abandoned shopping center in Hamra and had a very laid-back speakeasy-type atmosphere and a wicked oud player. As for food, still love Le Chef, an institution. Best cafe is Cafe Younes in Hamra. I used to live above the cafe in 1995-96 when it was just a place to buy freshly ground coffee and knock back a double espresso in the morning. Otherwise, it's local cafes and restaurants dotted around the country. Eat foul in the Tyre souq. There's a brilliant sandwich place in Dar al-Wassah in the Bekaa - best labneh sandwiches in Lebanon. I also stop at Abu Rashed next to the army barracks in Marjayoun. They make terrific shish taouq. Corny though it may sound, the best meal is the one with a couple of spit roast chickens, olives, bread and with the family on a picnic somewhere high up in the mountains.

That doesn't sound corny in the least. Thanks, Nick. As for the rest of you, you know what to do: buy Nick's book here.

On a recent plane ride home from Germany, I finished Steve Inskeep's Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, which I can recommend to all of you with confidence. I was, as I mention in my interview with Steve, happily surprised by this book. It's a really great introduction to both the mess that is Pakistan and the greatness that is the Pakistani people. It's also an interesting reflection on urban planning and the rise of mega-cities. Interviewing Steve bleeping Inskeep of all people can be an intimidating experience, but as with all of these things, I just posed some questions and let the man himself take it away.

I was happily surprised by this book. It's multidimensional: on the one hand, it tells the story of Karachi, but on the other hand, it also succeeds in telling that story within two broader contexts. First, it places Karachi within the context of Pakistan's history and politics. Second, it treats the development of Karachi as one example of what you see as a global trend: the rise of "instant cities." (I'm married to a woman who works on development in South Asia, so this is that rare book that we can read together.) Explain to the blog, though: what is an instant city?

Thanks for your generous comments. An instant city is a metropolis that’s grown so swiftly that a person who knew it at the end of World War II would scarcely recognize it today. I keep this definition impressionistic, because I’m not sure I fully trust all the statistics I’ve seen. But to be a little more precise, I define an instant city as one whose population has grown since the war at a substantially higher rate than the country to which it belongs. Those cities tend to be destinations of the greatest mass migration in human history, the worldwide move to cities in recent decades. As different kinds of people concentrate on a city, they mix together, trade ideas, or clash.

In an instant city, the new overshadows the old—as in Karachi, which has at least 30 residents today for every resident at war’s end. In historic terms, the city has appeared in an instant. It can change in an instant. Or turn deadly in an instant. In these respects, Karachi is normal in the developing world, as you both know from experience.

For American policymakers, our swift evolution into a mostly urban species affects everything from economic plans to foreign aid strategies to the battlegrounds of future wars. Or current wars: see Baghdad, ten times larger than in 1950 and a nightmarishly complex killing field for several years. Yet for all the horrors of such swiftly changing places, they’re also expressions of hope. People moved there seeking better lives.

The story of Karachi, meanwhile, as told in the book, is in many ways the story of the state of Pakistan. For an American audience, what does Karachi tell us about Pakistan today?

Pakistanis call Karachi a microcosm of their country, and they’re right. People have migrated from all over the country, as well as every other part of South Asia, to form Pakistan’s most diverse city. And so you see microcosms of Pakistan’s great conflicts between different ethnic groups who speak different languages, between religious groups, between rich and poor, between the military and everybody else. The military’s economic power is spectacularly on display along the waterfront, where they own many square miles of land near the beach, and have been developing luxury apartment towers, a “six-star” club, and a golf course. At the same time, far-flung neighborhoods have hardly any electricity or other services, and the real estate market thrives on unauthorized development on government land. It’s an impossibly complicated and stressful place. Yet there is a certain endurance in the people that keeps things moving, as does an eye on the main chance—you can make money in a growing city. Karachi still functions as the economic heart of Pakistan, which is one reason I don’t agree with those who describe Pakistan as a failed state. When I think failed state, I think Afghanistan in late 2001: little armies wandering around, burned-out tanks along bomb-cratered roads, scarecrow men trying to hand-crank the last dregs of fuel out of a gas-station pump. Pakistan is not that bad yet, although in all fairness the electricity does go out daily, and citizens use words like “crazy” or “mafia” to describe their government, and I do think large swaths of Karachi have evolved beyond conventional government control.

Middle Easterners and South Asians often tell me they "love Americans but don't very much like the United States." I sometimes feel the same about Pakistan -- a nation that has, at the very least, sheltered so many enemies of the United States over the past decade and has frustrated our efforts in Afghanistan. But I have so many wonderful Pakistani friends, and there are so many great Pakistani heroes in your book. The Edhi family -- "passionate, witty, resilient, and gloriously strange" in your words -- stands out in particular. At the nadir in U.S.-Pakistani relations, who are some other Pakistani heroes Americans should know about?

Let me call your attention to Dr. Seemin Jamali, a woman who for years has run the emergency department of a major public hospital in Karachi. On February 5, 2010, her emergency department was flooded with victims of a bombing and their families. A Shia procession had been struck—an attack on a religious minority, which is normal in Pakistan. And then a second bomb exploded at the entrance to the emergency department. Many people were killed, the windows were blown out, and the medical equipment was looted in the panic that followed—yet Dr. Jamali and her colleagues had the emergency department running again the next day. (Note: this fairly incredible story of courage and duty is told at greater length in the book.)

She told me afterward that she believed in treating every person the same, regardless of color, caste, or creed. It was a statement echoing an old speech by the founder of Pakistan. For all the awful things that some people have done over the years in Pakistan, the country also has a different and more honorable tradition. Some people struggle to uphold that tradition, even though many have been beaten, intimidated, silenced, driven into exile, or killed. This book will be worth the time and effort if I manage nothing other than to introduce Americans to a few such people.

My wife and I, like many thousands of other Americans, wake up to your dulcet voice every morning. Which begs the question: how the hell did you find the time to research and write this book while fulfilling your duties at NPR?

Thanks for listening. The short answer is that I missed a little work, lost a lot of sleep, and will forever be grateful for the forbearance of my family and friends. The longer answer is that I first reported Karachi in 2002, and did a series of reports on the city in 2008, so I had some history with the place. Then I took a series of trips expressly for the book in 2010, burning vacation time I had accumulated. Between trips I was gathering archival information from the Library of Congress and several other archives. And of course Pakistan has been constantly in the news, so I was regularly covering and learning about the country for my day job.

You report mostly from Washington. Does this book -- and the reporting from Pakistan that inspired it -- make you want to report more from abroad? Do you, like some think tankers I could name, sometimes feel chained to your office in the 202 area code?

I try not to be. Just before taking host jobs at NPR, I reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and knew I needed that to continue. I would not have accepted the Morning Edition job had it not included the freedom to travel and see things for myself. NPR embraced that idea and didn’t want it any other way. So I’ve been over the years to Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, and many other places at home and abroad. Every trip abroad informs interviews I do later from the studio. It’s true that I never travel as much as I think I should, and that I have to keep my trips very focused and hurry back to the show. Sometimes it kills me – I was in Egypt last spring, for example, but never made it to Libya. But there is some compensation. I work a job where, in the course of a few months, I might talk with a general, a novelist, an economist, the President, the governor of my home state, a poor laborer in a Cairo cement factory, voters in Ohio, and a widow outside New Orleans. It’s this wonderfully broad education. If you feel that I ended up writing a “multidimensional” book, maybe it grows out of my multidimensional job. It encourages broad thinking, and seeing the connections between seemingly unrelated stories, and feeling the sweep of history.

And here I was, thinking I had a pretty sweet gig myself. I end each of these things with a question on food and drink. What are the top three restaurants in Karachi, and why?

I’m delighted that you asked. If you visit friends in Karachi you will almost certainly be taken to Barbecue Tonight whether you ask to go or not. Nor should you mind. If you arrive early for dinner—and by early, I mean Pakistan early, about 10:00—you can get a table on the rooftop, looking across the harbor toward the central business district. Everything on the menu is outstanding. The restaurant is several floors high, and as you walk downstairs to leave at midnight you will notice that every table is filled and there is a line of people at the door.

I recommend the surreal experience of eating at Shaikh Abdul Ghaffar’s Kabab House, which is on a pier at the harbor known as the Native Jetty, now rebranded as “Port Grand,” a heavily guarded row of upscale shops. The meat here is so finely ground as to be almost creamy, but the real reason to go is the craziness of the setting. In one direction you see the harbor cranes; in the other, a waterside Hindu temple.

You will find some middlebrow choices if you venture through the chaotic traffic on Burns Road, or out in the industrial zone called SITE Town, where a gigantic madrassa makes some extra money running a rather clean and formal restaurant. But if you have a basic faith in the safety of cooked food, then I suggest that you bypass these choices and pick out one of many simple restaurants that are open to the street, with no front wall. They may serve only two or three dishes, cooked in metal pots by the entrance. The restaurant you want is probably not spiffy: a certain level of dilapidation often signals comfort food, sort of like when you arrive at an older American diner. In the book I feature one such restaurant called the Delhi Darbar, near the old city hall. The menu does not include much beyond soft drinks and biryani, hunks of meat and other ingredients mixed into rice. I have always found it to be excellent, although it is so powerfully spiced that in all honesty, if it wasn’t any good, I would never know.

Thanks for the tips! Steve can be heard each morning on NPR's Morning Edition, and his book can be bought here. 

This week in Washington, a conference at the National Defense University has gathered some of the world's leading experts on terrorism. A few nights ago, I joined some of them for a few beers and to be amazed by their collective brilliance. One conspicuous absence from the gathering was my friend Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who was out hitting the pavement, selling his new book, Bin Laden's Legacy: Why We're Still Losing the War on Terror. I read the book while it was still a .doc and really enjoyed it, so I appreciate the time he took to answer a few questions for the blog.

I really wish your new book were not as persuasive at it is. It makes for depressing reading, in large part because it’s such effective argumentation. Walk us through your thesis and summarize your argument.

Thanks for the kind words, Ex; as a long-time reader of your blog, it’s an honor to join you for this discussion. My thesis is that the United States has done a poor job of understanding al-Qaeda during the past decade, and as a result America’s offensive and defensive measures in the fight against the jihadi group have often played into its hands. Al-Qaeda had, in my view, two overarching strategic objectives on September 11, 2001. One was to diminish the powerful U.S. economy. The other was to make the conflict with the United States as broad as possible, expanding it into multiple regions and thus fueling the perception that America was at war with Islam, not just a small group of Islamic militants.

The U.S. lack of strategic understanding of al-Qaeda at an official level is easy to document through a look at the most important documents the government has produced addressing this question. A key example is the “National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism” (NMSP-WOT), published by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As you know, understanding an enemy’s ends, ways, and means is fundamental for military planners—that is, what is the enemy’s goal, and what are the ways and means by which the enemy will pursue this goal. The NMSP-WOT contains no ends, ways, and means assessment for al-Qaeda, but tellingly, does perform this analysis for the United States. Similarly, neither the White House’s “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism” nor the 9/11 Commission Report perform an ends, ways, and means assessment of the jihadi group. The typical method of analyzing al-Qaeda in these documents is discussing its goal of re-establishing the caliphate, and then its use of the tactic of terrorism—leaving an unresolved disconnect between goal and tactic. It’s as though the unstated assumption is that the group doesn’t think strategically, a truly unjustified assumption.

As a result, the U.S. measures for combating al-Qaeda often played into its hands. The price tag of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been over $1 trillion in direct budgetary outlays—and the true cost has been even greater when such second-order consequences as deficits and rising oil prices due to resulting instability are considered. And it isn’t just our wars that have driven up the cost of fighting Islamic extremism: the United States has also created a bloated, expensive, and inefficient system of defending the homeland against attack. Not all of our economic woes are attributable to the fight against al-Qaeda by any means: jihadis didn’t cause the subprime mortgage bubble, no matter what ridiculous claims they offer. [I think the jihadis run those loan shops outside military bases, actually. -- A.M.] But our spending on military, intelligence, homeland security, and other counterterrorism matters hasn’t helped. While I have some reservations about Brown University’s recent study about costs associated with military aspects of the “war on terror,” its hefty price tag of between $3.2 and $4 trillion seems like a reasonable estimate based on my research.

My book traces the evolution of al-Qaeda’s strategy for economically undermining the United States through several phases, including terrorist attacks aimed at economic targets, embroiling America in bleeding wars in the Muslim world, and attacking vital oil targets. This strategy culminates in the group’s current phase, which some militants have called the “strategy of a thousand cuts.” This refers to a phase of smaller but more frequent attacks—some of them expressly designed to drive up our security costs—that was initiated after the September 2008 collapse of the U.S. financial sector made us seem mortal to our enemies.

One of the significant framing devices in Bin Laden’s Legacy is the famous 1974 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. This fight was referenced in an article by political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft published in the journal International Security a few months before 9/11, titled “How the Weak Win Wars.” Foreman, the strongest fighter of that generation, was heavily favored—but was defeated by Ali’s “rope-a-dope” strategy, which turned Foreman’s strength against him. “Ali appeared to cower against the ropes,” Arreguín-Toft recounted. “Foreman, now confident of victory, pounded him again and again.” Though it appeared to spectators that Foreman was winning, the elastic ring ropes were in fact absorbing much of the force of the punches. Foreman’s attacks only succeeded in tiring him, and Ali pulled off an upset by knocking out his exhausted opponent in the eighth round. That, Arreguín-Toft argued, is how small and relatively weak actors (like al-Qaeda) can defeat a superpower like the United States: by turning its strength into a weapon against it. I think Bin Laden’s Legacy makes it depressingly clear that al Qaeda has been able to execute a rope-a-dope of its own over the past decade. The United States has battered it furiously, and has exhausted itself in the process.

I remember, when you were writing this book, you coming over to my apartment to talk about the Iraq War. As I recall, I had to pour a few whiskies for us before we could talk about Iraq. You make the case that Americans of all political stripes need to understand the negative consequences of our decision to go to war in Iraq and the way in which we went about the conflict there. Tell us more. (But wait for one moment while I fetch the rye.)

I think understanding the mistakes involved in our decision to go to war in Iraq is important because it was a major strategic blunder (and let’s be frank: the enormous human costs of the war make it so much more than that). A lot of our shortcomings in fighting jihadi militancy over the past decade have been strategic, and a failure to appreciate the consequences of the Iraq war means we haven’t grasped an absolutely vital strategic lesson.

Now, it’s well known that the justifications for the Iraq war haven’t held up: Saddam Hussein’s regime didn’t have an active WMD program, nor did it have significant connections to al-Qaeda (though some connections did in fact exist). And we can see many of the costs of that conflict clearly. In addition to the aforementioned human costs, our invasion of Iraq damaged the war effort in Afghanistan (which quickly became an economy-of-force mission as resources were diverted to the Iraq theater), allowed the regeneration of al-Qaeda’s core leadership as pressure was removed from it, angered our allies while empowering the Iranian regime, and served as a potent tool for jihadi recruitment.

These costs, though not totally unforeseeable, have become clearer after the fact. But one point I make in the book is that a better appreciation of al-Qaeda’s strategy would have made the dangers of invading Iraq quite apparent in advance. As I said, al-Qaeda had two overarching strategic ideas about defeating America: bleeding its superpower adversary’s economy, and making the battlefield on which the fight against the United States occurred as broad as possible. The Iraq war plainly advanced both of our adversary’s goals. Despite the best-case scenarios concerning the war’s costs trumpeted by the Bush administration, it was extremely expensive—something that people like army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki foresaw. And the Iraq invasion helped the other major element of al Qaeda’s strategy, broadening the battlefield and feeding the group’s narrative that Islam itself was under attack by the United States.

If we have waged this war on terror so foolishly, what is a smarter way to combat terror? If you could recommend some changes in U.S. policy to the president, what would you recommend?

My chapter containing policy prescriptions runs about 30 pages. A couple of notes about that. First, I really dislike the tendency of books and studies produced inside the Beltway to contain a fairly good description of the problem set that we confront, complemented by vague and often worthless policy prescriptions. Because of my reservations about that formula, I would have simply published a book without any policy recommendations if I felt that I couldn’t come up with something that legitimately added to our thinking. But second, from a policy perspective, I think the implementation of a concept tends to be more important than the basic concept itself. I find that when I distill my rather long thoughts on policy (the implementation) down to talking points (the concepts), some value is lost in translation.

That caveat (apology?) aside, my prescriptions fall into three basic categories: strategy, efficiency, and resiliency. I’ve already spoken about America's rather weak strategic understanding of al-Qaeda over the past decade. We can’t undo past mistakes, but we can prevent a repetition of the same errors if key officials are able to understand both the evolution of al-Qaeda’s strategy and where it stands as of 2011. Further, we need a strategy that is better suited to the age of austerity that we’re entering. Our military intervention in Libya, where the United States had essentially no strategic interests, is in my view the opposite of the kind of grand strategy we need in a world of constrained resources.

In terms of efficiency, we should be looking for ways to do more with less. One way is analytic reform in the intelligence community: creating professional incentives for analysts to specialize, and reducing unnecessarily duplicative efforts. As one analyst said to me while I was researching for the book: “How many of these 800,000 people within the intelligence community are actively advancing U.S. interests? If they aren’t doing so, there’s a legitimate question to be asked: Why are you here?” A second efficiency measure is civil service reform. One core reason for our overreliance on costly contractors for national security needs has been how difficult it is to hire and fire federal employees. Civil service reform has been politically impossible in the past, but it would so obviously be good for the country that I think it should be revisited.

As for resiliency, another terrorist attack may succeed despite our best efforts. We should be building up our societal resilience—not just infrastructural but also psychological. There are smart ways to empower individuals and at the same time make communities safer in the face of terrorism or natural disaster. The Community Emergency Response Team model employed in California and Phoenix, Arizona is promising.

I really enjoyed your first book, My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir. I think I read it in just a few evenings and found your personal story to be fascinating. You remain, in fact, the only Christian ex-Muslim Jew I know. If you don’t mind me asking a personal question, tell me how your spiritual journey continues to inform your scholarship and the questions you ask in your work.

I’m glad you enjoyed it. For readers who aren’t familiar with this rather unusual journey, and don’t feel like reading an entire book about it, I recently did a Bloggingheads segment with Matt Duss where I explain the whole thing fairly cogently. So there are a couple of ways this early-life experience informs my scholarship. One is that I take religion more seriously than a lot of scholars do. To be frank, I think that most (though by no means all) work in the field that touches upon religious or theological issues is embarrassingly bad, including numerous unproven assumptions and analytical errors that would likely be called out were the scholars discussing something other than religion. I also think there’s a bit of projection at play for largely secular academics: they often see religion as a thin pretext for violent non-state actors precisely because they themselves don’t find religion to be a strong motivating force. But just as you can’t simply assume that groups like al-Qaeda don’t think strategically, you also cannot simply ignore their proclamations that hold religion to be a strong motivating factor. This is not to say that their claims should be taken at face value: but at the very least, we owe it to ourselves as scholars to consider the possibility that they might be true.

The second way it informs my work might seem counterintuitive, but I find that I’m not forced to re-think my basic assumptions about issues I encounter in the field all that frequently. The reason for this relates to something that this spiritual journey instilled in the way I intellectually approach new problem sets. Now, this statement is counter-intuitive for an obvious reason: I changed religions a couple of times, a fact that on its face might make me seem flighty or prone to sudden shifts. But the spiritual progression that you outlined was a product of seeing something through a couple of different frames. Jesus had always been a compelling religious figure for me: my parents, though they didn’t believe in his divinity, had artwork of Jesus around the house when I was growing up, and I had a decent familiarity with the New Testament. One of the reasons I became Muslim was because my level of comfort with that faith’s explanation of Jesus was greater than my level of comfort with Christianity’s explanation. At that point, I saw religion through a specific, rather Western lens: I thought the purpose of religion was forging a relationship with God with which I felt comfortable. After I graduated from college, I worked for a Wahhabi charity, and the frame through which I viewed religion shifted: I came to see its purpose not as forging a relationship with God that made me comfortable, but as understanding and obeying God’s will. I came to accept some rather extreme conclusions about what my faith mandated within this paradigm. Obviously, I moved away from that, and have been a practicing Christian for more than a decade.

But one result of that rather circuitous religious journey is that I find, at this point in my life, that I intuitively examine a new problem set I encounter through multiple frames at the very outset. Similar to how I ended up seeing religion through several different paradigmatic lenses over the course of a few years, I now, when approaching a new problem, try to understand it through several different paradigmatic lenses before drawing any conclusions. This is not to say that I’m more thoughtful than other people in my field; just that I have a different approach than I would have without the experiences that you touch upon, and I think I am therefore more thoughtful than I would have been otherwise.

While we’re on personal subjects, it’s no secret that the blogosphere and Twitter encourage the worst snark, sarcasm and ugliness from people. You and I have talked about our mutual struggles to remain civil and polite while engaging with others, but unlike me, your reputation is unimpeachable: you always respond to your critics and other readers with politeness and courtesy. Why does civility matter in our line of work? And how do you discipline your own speech in the public sphere? Is there a trade-off? Do we lose something in terms of honesty by being polite?

I’ve come to see civility as important for a variety of reasons, but honestly, practical reasons loom rather large. First of all, it’s generally hard to win a name-calling contest. If I call someone an America-hating pinko, they can fire back that I’m a right-wing tool of the military industrial complex. Those two insults seem essentially to cancel each other out: why give someone an area that can end up a draw if I believe that I can prove all of my other arguments to be correct? Second, I find that if I’m civil, I can actually (sometimes) persuade people I’m arguing against that they’re wrong about an issue. In contrast, if I begin a debate by insulting someone, it only further entrenches him in his initial position, thus making it more difficult to talk sense into him.

I’ve found the balance I strike in my own small corner of the public sphere to be rather intuitive and comfortable. I’m unyielding when making arguments, but generally try not to belittle the people I’m engaging. If they really are so dumb that I feel like I can’t help but insult them, it’s almost always easier to disengage than to tell them how I really feel.

I don’t think there’s a trade-off involved in being polite. Being polite isn’t the same as being a pushover, nor is it the same as false collegiality that needlessly avoids confrontation. Indeed, I think that kind of fake collegiality should be avoided: the review I published this year of Robert Pape and James Feldman’s Cutting the Fuse is probably one of the harshest critiques a graduate student has produced of a work of that stature. But again, it eviscerates their argument without really personalizing the matter.

Finally, I think it’s much more important to be polite or collegial to people who are just breaking into the public sphere and are feeling their way around than to those who are well established. For those who are young and realize they have a lot to learn, it’s possible to help them in that process. People who are better established are usually more hardened in their views. For those who have become tenured professors or have been part of the National Security Staff, if I don’t like what they stand for now, then I probably never will.

You may be a tree-hugging Oregonian, but your charming wife is a Daughter of the South and knows her whisky. What has she taught you over a decade of marriage? When you’re writing and need a glass of something stronger than coffee, what do you reach for?

I’ve learned an enormous amount from Amy, though I’m sure she finds me to be an intolerably slow study. In addition to helping me to gain a finer appreciation of whisky, two things that she’s taught me stand out. One is that she’s helped me to be more comfortable relying on other people. I had long conducted myself very much as a loner, dealing with whatever issue or challenge I faced internally. Being willing to reach out to others is healthy, it turns out, though it’s still not my first impulse. And second, basically since I was a high school student, work has been an all-consuming passion. Amy has helped me to step back from that and better appreciate non-work things, non-work time.

When I need a glass of something stronger than coffee, gin and tonic is my drink of choice.

Solid choice, Daveed.

Readers, you know what to do: buy the man's book.

George MacDonald Fraser, in his memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, already has one of my favorite quotes (.pdf) about platoon leadership in combat:

If you want to know how scared you've a right to be, look at the men around you. And if you happen to be a young subaltern, remember that they're looking at you.

Over the weekend, though, I finished his hilarious collection of stories The General Danced at Dawn. I do not think I have read a finer piece of prose on the anxieties and excitement of platoon leadership anywhere else. I cannot recommend it highly enough, so I'll just add that it was none other than Bob Killebrew, no stranger to small unit combat leadership himself, who recommended it to me in the first place. 

If you are like me, you mostly avoided the television and the op-ed pages today. I am not sure it is entirely healthy that we force ourselves, as a society, to grieve anew ten full years after a traumatic event like the September 11th attacks. Surely the best rebuke to an organization like al-Qaida would have been to have simply gone about our business as a nation, worshipping with our neighbors in the morning, watching football in the afternoon at the local bar, and in the evening preparing for a new workweek. Although my own path in life was in part set in motion by the attacks in 2001, I believe the best American response to the anniversary would have been to have simply enjoyed one another while hoping and planning toward tomorrow rather than mourning anew those lost in yesteryear.

But the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks does, I must say, give us a moment to pause and reflect on what lessons, if any, we have learned over the past decade. So while dining with Norwegian expert-on-all-things-jihadi Thomas Hegghammer in Oslo last week, I came up with the idea of asking him to participate in a special interview with the blog for the anniversary.

How much do I respect Thomas and his scholarship? I even changed the way I normally spell al-Qaeda al-Qaida for this post because honestly, who the heck am I to tell Thomas what's what?

A few years ago, you wrote a great essay in the Times Literary Supplement arguing that the trauma of the September 11th attacks retarded the development of dispassionate scholarship on jihadi movements. 10 years after the attacks, how are we doing? Has the field of study evolved in the United States? (While you’re at it, explain to us why it seems as if every tenth Norwegian has published peer-reviewed scholarship on al-Qaida.)

First of all, thank you for inviting me to contribute to your blog on this special day. Allow me also to take off my “dispassionate scholar hat” and extend my sympathy to the families of those killed on 9/11 and of the many who fell in the wars that ensued.

Ten years after 9/11, I am sorry to report that the academic study of jihadi movements is still underdeveloped. Things have improved a little bit since I wrote the TLS piece in 2008. There is a core of specialists who continue to do fantastic work, and we see some new recruitment to the field. But the community is still very small and populated mostly by people who are on the fringes of the academy, institutionally speaking (and that includes myself).

The fundamental problem is still the same, namely that the incentive structure in the universities, especially in America, is set against people specialising in the study of jihadi gorups. Studying al-Qaida usually involves qualitative methods and requires high-level skills in Arabic or some other oriental language. Graduate students with an interest in jihadism thus work against two strong biases: the quantitative methods hegemony in the social sciences and the skepticism in American Middle East Studies toward the study of hard security issues. These biases affect hiring decisions and have some striking aggregate effects: for example, there are virtually no tenured faculty specialising in terrorism (let alone jihadism) in any Ivy League school or in any Middle East Studies department in America. Rational graduate students with academic ambitions see this and wisely stay clear of the topic.

A related problem is that jihadism studies in the US lack an institutional home. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has partly filled this role, but even the CTC has rarely had more than one or two Arabic-speaking al-Qaida specialists based at West Point at any one time; several of the CTC’s best reports were written by off-site contractors. Another potential hub for al-Qaida studies was the Centre on Law and Security at New York University, but it recently scaled down its activities and looks set to close down. How America – with its huge academic workforce and enormous counterterrorism budget – in ten years has failed to produce a research institution with more than two permanent jihadism specialists is beyond me. As far as Norway is concerned, we actually only have around five scholars focusing on al-Qaida, but we have put them all in one place – the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) – and given them stable working conditions. By having 3-4 academics working on closely related subjects and interacting every day you get tremendous synergy.

Our friend Will McCants has been arguing that the Arab Spring is a disaster for al-Qaida. Do you agree?

The Arab spring is certainly bad for al-Qaida, but I would not call it a disaster, because the uprisings have so far only affected parts of the Muslim world. Important countries like Pakistan remain largely unaffected, as do the conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and elsewhere. In some places such as Yemen and Libya, jihadi groups arguably have more opportunities now than before the Arab spring. The short and mid-term security implications of the Arab spring are highly unpredictable. At the moment we see a decline of al-Qaida central, but it is difficult to disentangle the effect of the Arab spring from the effect of the concurrent tactical breakthroughs, such as the killing of top al-Qaida commanders and the capture of internal AQ documents. That said, I do think the overall net effect of the Arab spring is negative for the jihadi movement in the long term.

The United States has enjoyed some stunning successes against al-Qaida’s senior leadership in 2011. In Oslo, we discussed the possibility that al-Qaida Central might in fact collapse with a speed that could surprise us all. Sketch out a scenario by which that might happen. What does the rapid collapse of al-Qaida Central look like, and under what conditions might we expect it?

It is difficult for me to say, because academics like myself know precious little about the current inner workings of al-Qaida Central. The only people who have a chance of knowing what is going on are in the intelligence community, and whatever I say about the subject is sure to make someone in that community laugh. My overall impression, though, is that al-Qaida central has been severely weakened over the past six months.

Your award-winning book on al-Qaida and Islamism in Saudi Arabia has been justly praised. Tell us about your thesis, and also why al-Qaida’s insurgency was such a failure in Saudi Arabia in 2004 and 2005.

The book is basically a history of violent Islamism in Saudi Arabia after 1979. It tries to explain the ebbs and flows of militant activism in the Kingdom, focusing on the 2003-2006 terrorism campaign by al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula. I show that the campaign was not an organically developed domestic rebellion, but rather the work of an foreign-trained network of militants who had returned to Saudi Arabia after al-Qaida’s eviction from Afghanistan in late 2001. The rebels never enjoyed much popular support and failed to recruit outside a closed network of jihad veterans and their acquaintances. This made them an easy prey for the Western-supported security services.

A key argument in the book is that we have tended to overestimate the level of political opposition to the Saudi regime, because we have equated Islamism with anti-government activism. Observers have assumed that because Saudi Arabia has many Islamists, anti-regime sentiment must run very deep. But there are different types of Islamism and not all have regime change as their priority. The Kingdom has produced a lot of jihadists over the years, but most have been what I call extreme pan-Islamists rather than revolutionaries; that is, they preferred to fight non-Muslims rather than fellow Muslims. In fact, the normative barriers to revolutionary violence appear to be higher in Saudi Arabia than in the Arab republics. The non-revolution in Saudi Arabia earlier this year seems to bolster this hypothesis.

One of the more horrifying things I have seen recently was at your house: a DVD of jihadi propaganda and music sitting alongside a Norwegian children’s DVD. Tell us about your latest project examining jihadi culture. And please, also assure my readership (and your wife) that you do not sometimes get your DVDs confused and show your children jihadi propaganda.

Well, the two worlds are closer than you think. Some children’s entertainment is so bad it must be the work of al-Qaida. I have reason to suspect that Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri created the Teletubbies to destroy Western society from within.

The project you are referring to is about jihad culture, or “the things jihadis do when they don’t fight.” It is inspired by the observation that militants in the underground spend a lot of time doing things that appear to serve no immediate military purpose, like singing songs, reciting poetry, or discussing dreams. They also do unexpected things like weep on a regular basis, notably when reciting the Qur’an. The infamous Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, for example, was known among fellow militants as both “the butcher” (al-dhabbah) and “a weeper” (baki). All this “soft matter” of jihadism remains virtually unstudied; one reason, I think, is that it has been considered less consequential than the hard stuff of terror, such as attacks, resources, organizational structures and the like. My hypothesis is that jihad culture is not inconsequential at all; instead I think it may shed important new light on the processes by which jihadi groups recruit, exercise organizational control and make tactical decisions. I am sure that the military men and women reading this blog will find all this rather intuitive, because they have experienced the important role of music and rituals in their own organization.

As a first step in the inquiry, I am currently working with a great team of scholars on an edited volume that will explore various dimensions of jihad culture. I have recruited subject specialists – including a musicologist, an Arabic poetry expert, and an anthropologist of dreams – to help document and decipher al-Qaida’s internal culture. We are only scraping the surface of this vast topic but hopefully it will inspire others to dig deeper. Eventually I hope to write a monograph on some aspect of this topic, but that’s a few years down the line.

I usually end these Q&A’s with a list of the interviewee’s favorite drinking holes. And I imagine it must be depressing to be such a leader in your field of study yet still be only the second-brightest scholar in your own home. This, perhaps, explains your excellent taste in spirits. Tell us the best places to sip a gin-and-tonic from Princeton to Oslo to, er, Riyadh.

Princeton: The Triumph Brewing Company – a decent microbrewery and the least bad place in town for a drink.

Cambridge: The Conservatory in the Harvard Faculty Club – extremely preppy, but that is the whole point.

Oslo: For beer, I prefer Olympen, a 120-year old beer hall on the city’s east side. For G&Ts, I guess I would go for the deep leather couches of the Bristol Bar.

Riyadh: If I could sneak in a bottle of gin, I would drink it in either on the bridge of the Mamlaka Tower or in the golden ball of the Faysaliyya Center.

Takk! I knew there was a reason I went to school in Philadelphia (with its excellent bars and pubs) rather than New Jersey! (Or Riyadh -- not entirely sure which would be worse, honestly.) As for the rest of you, go buy the man's book here.

I spent part of my vacation reading the new book by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda. Thom and Eric wrote the book while on a writing fellowship here at the Center for a New American Security, so I'm relieved that I a) very much enjoyed reading it and b) can recommend it to the readership. It's a brisk read -- short enough to read while trapped in your houses as a hurricane blows over, for example -- and has all the hallmarks of the great reporting you have come to expect from two of the NYT's finest. 

This will come as no surprise to those who have followed your reporting for the New York Times, but this book was carefully and exhaustively reported. You guys face a tough dilemma, though: when reporting on secret programs, the best sources will often not talk. And although you have managed to interview some of the key decision makers, are you worried that your reporting is limited by its sources? How do you write “The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda” and not “The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda As Told To Us By The People We Got To Speak On The Record?”

It’s wonderful to be asked why we had so many people on the record! Usually we are criticized for too many confidential sources. In Counterstrike, we used both, extensively. Our book is drawn from more than two hundred interviews conducted with current and former military personnel, diplomats, and intelligence officers, as well as law enforcement, Pentagon, and White House officials who participated in the operations, intelligence analysis, and policy making in the decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When possible, we named the sources. But because of the nature of reporting on sensitive operations and policies, often involving classified information, many of our sources spoke to us on the condition that they remain anonymous. In each case where we used anonymous sources, we carefully weighed the trade-offs between the need for transparency in reporting this book and the important information that confidential sources could provide. We also found that many sources who might be otherwise reluctant to talk to us for an article for the daily newspaper agreed to speak to us for the book. They wanted to ensure that their perspective on this historic period was understood and chronicled.

You guys cover a lot of breaking, Page A1 news. How difficult is it to step back and write a more reflective piece of journalism looking at a decade-long era?

The hardest part was time-management. We found that to make it all work we had to give 50 percent of our time to our reporting for the Times; 50 percent of our time to the book; 50 percent of our time to our loving and long-suffering wives; and 50 percent of our time to our kids (we each have two). Fortunately, all the time left over was ours, and we could use it to relax. In many ways, we began reporting the book on 9/11, even though we didn’t begin considering a book until about three years ago. But this is what we have done for the past decade. What we discovered in our first work of long-form narrative was the incredible amount of detail a reporter can develop when working on a two-year book project: The ability to return to sources not just once, but multiple times. The ability to check and cross-check stories, and really dig for details. The ability to trace a tip about an important counterterrorism raid and have time to track down participants from the small unit up to the senior commanders – and trace the effect and impact across the inter-agency. The ability to identify characters who had significant counterterrorism roles throughout the decade after 9/11, and were willing to talk to us. Those things you simply cannot do on a daily deadline.

If I had a complaint about the book, it’s that it often read, especially in the middle chapters, like a list of inputs and not effects. This is a real and common problem we researchers have in evaluating counter-terror programs. We know what we are doing. What’s tougher to tell is, what effect are we having on the enemy? To that end, what programs do you think are having the biggest effects on al-Qaeda? What is working? What is not?

You are a smart reader. The insurmountable problem is that we are covering counterterrorism missions from only one side. For obvious reasons, we could not bounce our reporting off of some Al Qaeda press spokesman or operations officer or financier to say, “Hey, we are writing about this mission. Is this how it went down against you? Is this how successful it was?” But we did our due diligence by comparing what sources told us to what responses appeared on jihadist Web sites, and it usually tracked with what we heard from sources here. Clearly, the kinetics have had an impact, as have missions to dry up sources of finances. What remains in the D- department, if not failing, are the efforts to counter the message of violent extremism. If the United States and its allies have been forced to offer an effective counterposing narrative to those who bomb and behead innocents, then the United States has lost before it has even started.

Along the same lines, you guys don’t outright grade the performance of the past few administrations on counter-terror, so I’m going to give you the chance to do that. On an A-F scale, what grade would you assign …

a. The Bush Administration, 2001-2003?

b. The Bush Administration, 2003-2005?

c. The Bush Administration, 2005-2007?

d. The Bush Administration, 2007-2009?

e. The Obama Administration, 2009-2011?

We think readers of our book would come away seeing that the Bush administration adopted a muscular if clumsy capture-kill strategy in the months after 9/11. Understandable, necessary, but not sufficient. And, as Rumsfeld noted in his famous October 2003 memo, kinetics alone risked creating more jihadists than were taken off the battlefield. By the second Bush administration, officials were adopting a more nuanced strategy, one that involved the whole of government to try and counter violent extremism with every tool available. Although Obama was certainly the un-Bush, it is historic fact that his administration has been as much continuity in the CT world as change. Drone strikes? Embraced and expanded. SOF raids? Tempo increased. But Obama certainly has changed the tenor of the discussion with the Islamic world, and even with European allies, and his efforts to close Gitmo, while still unsuccessful, set him apart, to be sure.

This book covers a lot of ground. What chapter do you wish you could have expanded on or dug deeper into?

Cyber and counter-messaging.

I usually end these interviews by asking people to name their favorite bars and such. For you guys, I’ll ask a different question: what are the three weirdest places you have ever met a source for an interview?

Thom:

1. Radovan Karadzic’s chalet at Pale, his mountain redoubt above Sarajevo. He was not yet an indicted war criminal, but we were reporting extensively on the atrocities he had ordered, so it was difficult to get an interview with the Bosnian Serb leader. So we drove from Belgrade up into the mountains, and while my translator was speaking with his aides, I tried to strike up a conversation with his bodyguards, who were playing poker. “Hey guys. What’re the stakes?” I asked. One responded: “Winner gets to shoot the guy from the Trib.” At the time, I was the guy from the Trib.

2. When I was a Moscow bureau chief, dissidents and underground artists always wanted to meet foreign correspondents. So you’d choose a big public location, with signals to identify one another. One spot was a big toy store across Dzerzhinsky Square from the old Lubyanka KGB prison. Sort of hiding in plain sight, I guess. Many of those I met were legitimate outsiders who had a bona fide story to tell about the crimes of the Soviet state. But not always. And I guess the KGB didn’t want to send its stooges too far, because over the course of five years and hundreds of such meetings I went to Children’s World several dozen times -- and among those I met were a Ukrainian nationalist, a Jewish refusenik and a formerly imprisoned poet; but all three of these were the same guy, who obviously couldn’t keep track of which reporters he had tried to set up.

3. I have one defense industry source who likes quick meetings. He will drive up in front of our bureau on Farragut Square, roll down the darkened windows of his SUV and toss me documents. One day our bureau chief was heading out to lunch and saw the exchange, which was too bad. It made the job of Pentagon correspondent look way too easy.

Eric:

1. Inside a sweltering reed hut in Al Turaba, Iraq, a dust-choked village 20 miles from the Iranian border. I was traveling with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz in July 2003. He had flown to the village to listen to a dozen wizened tribal elders from the area who asked him to restore a way of life that Saddam Hussein had taken away. Sitting cross-legged in his stocking feet on a Persian rug, Wolfowitz nodded in agreement as the old men chronicled the plight of the marsh Arabs, an ancient people whose homeland in southeastern Iraq had been drained into desert as punishment for their independence and Shiite faith. It was 120 degrees outside the hut and even hotter inside, but Wolfowitz still wore a blue blazer and red tie, both coated with dust. It was hard to hear him and the elders over the raucous banter of scores of villagers jammed inside the hut and a donkey's braying outside.

2. Several hundred feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean inside the U.S.S. Kentucky, one of the Navy’s Trident II ballistic-missile. When I was a young Pentagon correspondent in the early 1990’s, I tried to get out with troops as much as possible. I flew in an Air Force fighter jet. I rode in Army M1-A1 tank. But inside the submerged submarine on a training run in 1993 was eerie. Capt. Mike Riegel and his crew were amenable to talking about their vessel. But no loud voices, please. The cold war was over by then, but there were still reminders of a time when crew members feared that the slightest racket on board could give away a submarine’s position to the Soviets. Equipment was lined in plastic or rubber to avoid pings or banging. Signs in toilet stalls sternly warned crew members: "Don't Drop That Seat. Shhhhhh!"

3. On a very sensitive story several years ago that involved American spies, commandos and scandal, one of our main sources agreed to meet periodically at a coffee shop along a major Interstate freeway in a Western state. But we never met him in the same place twice. The source gave me and my colleague a cell phone. We never knew exactly when he was going to call. But when he did, he gave us the name of a highway exit and a coffee shop there. We met several times over about many months, each time collecting new information from him and corroborating (or rejecting) tips we heard from other sources. He was always spot on. After the article was published, we received a cryptic message, “Well done.” We never heard from him again.

Wow, who knew John McCain had gotten so paranoid about reporters! Anyway, thanks for the interview, guys. Buy Counterstrike here.

I have a tremendous amount of admiration for Gen. Marty Dempsey, but his professional reading list for the U.S. Army (.pdf) leaves a lot to be desired. As a service to the readership, I am offering my own professional reading list. I have kept the general categories used by Gen. Dempsey but have replaced the "leadership" category with one on civilian-military relations. My reading list is automatically superior to Gen. Dempsey's because mine does not include one of the worst novels ever written. I have denoted those books on which Gen. Dempsey and I agree with an asterisk. 

History and Heritage

The War for America, 1775-1783

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

Foote's The Civil War (YES, ALL THREE VOLUMES, DAMMIT)

The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War*

The First World War

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (YES, I KNOW HE WAS A MARINE)

This Kind of War*

Street Without Joy: The French Debacle In Indochina

Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age

Surprise, Security, and the American Experience

Civilian-Military Relations

The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations

Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

Critical Analysis and the Global Context

On War*

(read alongside Michael Howard's Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction)

Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point*

The Culture of National Security

Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It

Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Arms and Influence

I am off for a week's vacation on the family farm in East Tennessee and will be away from the blog during that time, so I wanted to highlight a few reading suggestions while I am away.

1. I took a little good-natured teasing for suggesting over Twitter that I can often find policy-relevant research in the American Political Science Review and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, but this month's IJMES really does have a great roundtable discussion that will be of interest to those studying the Middle East from a policy perspective and, specifically, what is taking place in the "Arab Spring."

In Foreign Affairs a few months back, Greg Gause wrote:

Scholars did not predict or appreciate the variable ways in which Arab armies would react to the massive, peaceful protests this year. This oversight occurred because, as a group, Middle East experts had largely lost interest in studying the role of the military in Arab politics.

A number of scholars do, though, take the study of Arab militaries quite seriously. And this month's IJMES features a roundtable discussion on "Rethinking the Study of Middle East Militaries" with short essays by Yezid Sayigh, Roger Owen, Robert Springborg, Oren Barak and others. I highly recommend policy-interested scholars of the region check it out.

[Warning: what follows has nothing to do with the topics normally considered on this blog. Proceed at your own risk.]

2. I am getting a little tired of political journalists and their thumb-nail deep understanding of trends within and strands of evangelical and fundamentalist Christian thought in America. Even as good an article as Ryan Lizza's profile of Michelle Bachmann -- which I enjoyed -- left something to be desired in its treatment of Francis Schaeffer and evangelical theology. Most treatments of the religious beliefs of Bachmann and also Rick Perry that I have been reading over the past few weeks are clumsy at the least and intolerant and ignorant at the worst. Watching Bachmann on Meet the Press on Sunday, for example, I was shaking my head in disbelief as the candidate advanced her "understanding" of "economics," but once David Gregory started grilling her on her theological beliefs, I started considering the whole exchange unfair, uninformed and inappropriate.*

If political journalists are going to start writing about the theological beliefs of people like Bachmann and Perry, they should first take the time to study evangelicalism and fundamentalisms within American Christianity in a serious way. One great, pithy (just 224 pages!) introduction to the subject, even if it is a bit dated, is George Marsden's Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Another great book, which is really a criticism of evangelical anti-intellectualism and should be read by believers and non-believers alike, is Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Reading these books -- or, at the very least, the first book -- will better equip Americans of all trades and political stripes to speak intelligently about the evangelical and, in cases, fundamentalist beliefs of some candidates for the presidency.

I suspect that as many of these politicians have been as influenced by John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones as by R. J. Rushdoony and J. Gresham Machen, and it's important for political reporters to know the differences and similarities between them all if they are going to start throwing out names and ideas as being relevant to the election.

*Look, I realize that it's the politicians who have opened to door to a discussion of their faiths by making such a big deal out of them in front of prospective voters. But last Sunday, it seemed as if David Gregory was telling Michelle Bachmann she was theologically wrong, and it just struck me as terribly unfair. For one brief moment, such did Gregory's line of questioning bother me, I found myself actually rooting for Bachmann.

Genius CNAS research assistant Mirv "Matt" Irvine, who knows more about Pakistani militant groups than most, has written a review of my friend Steve Tankel's new book on Lashkar-e Taiba. Enjoy.

***

Multiple bombings tore through downtown Mumbai last week, killing 17 people. Though attributed to domestic Indian Mujadhedin, these attacks revived painful memories of the devastating 2008 raid launched by 10 Lashkar-e-Taiba fighters in the same city. Last week’s attack did not amass near the casualties as LeT’s 2008 spectacle, but it comes at a critical juncture in the still tenuous security environment of South Asia.

With U.S.-Pakistani relations approaching near complete dysfunction over the bin Laden raid, the latest attacks brought further suspicion of Pakistan and its ability and willingness to control its cadre of state-sponsored militant groups.  A new book, Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba (Columbia University Press, 2011), by Stephen Tankel shines a new light on the murky world of Pakistan’s premiere militant group and its rise to become one of the world’s most dangerous non-state actors (a term used very loosely).

The 2008 attacks marked a turning point for Lashkar-e-Taiba and for Pakistan's infamous ISI: the Mumbai raid signaled the arrival of Lashkar as a globally capable terrorist organization and was a clear example of the explosive danger of Pakistan and its military and intelligence services' active support for terrorist proxies against India. According to Tankel, the Pakistani "army and ISI essentially built Lashkar's military apparatus from the mid-1990s onward specifically for use against India."

In discussing Pakistan's calculus following the 9/11 attacks, Tankel argues that the Musharraf regime and ISI divided the country's militants into good and bad jihadis. Lashkar won out over other terrorist groups because it "was the most reliable in Islamabad's eyes and fared the best." Lashkar would occupy an increasingly prominent role in the India-Pakistan conflict as the two nuclear powers sought to avoid conventional clashes due to the risk of escalation.

Pakistan resisted eliminating its proxies throughout the last decade to preserve what the ISI viewed as "a necessary auxiliary force in the event of a war with India, which they continued to view as an existential threat." Following the 2008 Mumbai attacks, according to Tankel, "the security services made no attempt to dismantle the military apparatus that produced Lashkar's militants and which made the Mumbai attacks possible."

Just as Pakistan practices a double game with the United States and militant proxies today, Lashkar itself balances its state sponsor's interests with its own effort to support the jihad against America and the West. Tankel documents how Lashkar capitalized on its protected position within Pakistan by offering safe haven to other jihadi groups, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan against American forces, recruiting and training al Qaeda fighters and participating in terrorist attacks in Pakistan and abroad.

U.S. policymakers are increasingly focusing on Lashkar as an emerging transnational threat that weighs heavily on not only U.S. counterterrorism objectives but also the broader U.S.-Pakistani relationship. As a parting component of Storming the World Stage, Tankel answers the question: Does Lashkar threaten the U.S. and its Western allies at home and abroad? Yes. According to him, the group's role in the war in Afghanistan, its targeting of foreign interests in India and elsewhere and its increasingly global operations make it a direct threat to U.S. interests. More alarmingly for Tankel, Lashkar's continued "work as part of a consortium" of militant actors working in concert makes it a key enabler for transnational terrorism, one that receives support and protection from the Pakistani government.

Lashkar is not going to fade from the world stage for the foreseeable future. Policymakers in the U.S. and throughout the world must increasingly plan for dealing with the group. However, it is also important to note that the group and its Pakistani sponsors are not unitary actors and, as Tankel notes, "unless something changes, arresting this tide will only grow more difficult with time."

Tankel has produced one of the definitive accounts of Lashkar’s rise as well as the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and his book should be the go-to-guide for those looking to understand Pakistan’s reliance on proxies against India and its attached baggage.

Suggested follow-on reading: Sebastian Rotella’s Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks: The Untold Story and Bruce Riedel’s Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad.

Matthew Irvine is a researcher at the Center for a New American Security and co-author of the report Beyond Afghanistan: A Regional Security Strategy for South and Central Asia.